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AESCHYLUS CHARACTERIZED
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| This article, translated by Melville B. Anderson, was first published in English in William Shakespeare. Victor Hugo. Chicago: A.C. McClurg and Co., 1886. p. 47-8. |
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THERE is something ghastly in Aeschylus from one end to the other; there is a vague outline of an extraordinary Medusa behind the figures in the foreground. Aeschylus is splendid and formidable; as though you saw a frowning brow above the sun. He has two Cains, Eteocles and Polynices; Genesis has but one. His troop of Oceanides comes and goes under a dark sky, like a flock of driven birds. Aeschylus has none of the recognized proportions. He is shaggy, abrupt, excessive, unsusceptible of softened contour, almost savage, with a grace all his own like that of the flowers of wild nooks, less haunted by nymphs than by the furies, siding with the Titans, among the goddesses choosing the austere and greeting the Gorgons with a sinister smile, like Othryx and Briareus a son of the soil, and ready to scale the skies anew against the upstart Jupiter. Aeschylus is ancient mystery made man; something like a Pagan prophet. His work, if we had it all, would be a kind of Greek Bible. Poet hundred-handed, having an Orestes more fatal than Ulysses and a Thebes grander than Troy, hard as rock, tumultuous like the foam, full of steeps, torrents, and precipices, and such a giant that at times one might take him for a mountain. Coming later than the ILIAD, he has the air of an elder brother of Homer.
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